One-way and two-way wireless communications are a relatively well-understood area of endeavor. In many cases, various network elements comprise an infrastructure that support the communications needs of one or more mobile stations. These communications needs can comprise voice calls, data communications, and so forth. In many cases, modern communications networks comprise a large number of geographically differentiated wireless access points that essentially define the network's edge. Such geographic differentiation, in turn, facilitates significant reuse of various network resources such as radio frequency bearer channels, control channels, time slots, spreading codes, and so forth. Aggressive reuse of such resources then facilitates viably supporting a relatively large user population.
Such communication networks often serve to support the communication needs of mobile users as those mobile users move with respect to the communication system infrastructure. This, however, gives rise to a need to support various mobility management functions such as, but not limited to:                Connected mode mobility (for example, handover of a presently communicating mobile station from one wireless access point to another);        Idle mode mobility (for example, supporting and effecting location updates for and/or paging of supported mobile stations);        Subscriber and call session management (for example, authentication, authorization, and accounting services, policy administration, and so forth);        Radio frequency resource management (for example, resource scheduling, admission control, dynamic quality of service management, load balancing, and so forth);to name but a few.        
There are various problems and concerns that arise when supporting such mobility management capabilities. For example, the infrastructure must remain current with respect to a given mobile station's present point of attachment to the system in order to ensure that data packets intended for that mobile station arrive in a timely manner. Unfortunately, as mobility management requirements are tending to grow, so, to, grows infrastructure complexity (including but not limited to hierarchical differentiation and network element layering). As a result, maintaining an increasing quantity of mobility management information within an increasingly complex infrastructure often requires significant internal resources and can even introduce limits with respect to how large a given system architecture might be otherwise scaled.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the arts will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions with respect to their corresponding respective areas of inquiry and study except where specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein. For example, as used herein, the expression “Internet Protocol” will be readily understood to refer to any presently existing or hereafter developed Internet protocol including, but not limited to, IPv4 and IPv6.